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Topic: RIP Philip Seymour Hoffman (Read 13218 times)

Sad. Remembered the D&D Matress Man commercial. On my phone I can't see where there must be an edit for PSH to come back in after the fall by what I assume must be a stunt person who is edited in right before the jump.

I can already see the white text fading in on black background after the final shot of Inherent Vice.. "In memory of"

He'll probably get a special mention in the oscars too.

it's not just someone famous, it's not just someone who was in successful movies and then died an ironic and sudden death, it's not just someone who had played an iconic tv character and then made an ok movie that everyone went to see because it was his last movie and have already forgotten what it was about cos it wasn't that good.

this guy was a great artist. he had real passion. like someone else here said, he was someone who "gets it". and he was so close to PTA! i don't think there's any other actor who has played a more influential role in his development as a filmmaker, maybe PBH or JCR. it's like if De Niro had died right after Goodfellas.

i feel like a simple in memoriam will not suffice. that he needs to honoured in some greater way than just a few words on a screen. maybe pta will step up to the plate.

the most important thing about hoffman for me was his ability to play ANY character, and how inspiring that is. not just as an actor, but as a human. he reflected the broadest possible range of humanity. as special as each individual performance was, the sum of those parts is so profound it's difficult to contemplate. one guy went to all those places.

and he was incredibly generous about his art. i don't blame someone like ddl for taking years between movies, but hoffman gave us an absurd number of beautiful performances, even in stuff that was otherwise garbage. he wasn't precious about his abilities. he did along came polly the year before capote. there's always a collection of really singular artists on this planet doing their thing, but very few of those artists can be that prolific.

it's really hard to process that i'm living in a world where he no longer gives his art. the idea of losing him was so out of the realm of imagination.

what picolas said.the range of PSH was insane. i was watching bits of Mission Impossible 3 on TV with my friends on saturday, then i took an eight hour bus trip yesterday, start getting messages on the cell phone about his death and Moneyball comes up. i try not to get cosmical about these things, so what i think happened was:while my friends and i were surfing tv, we stopped surfing BECAUSE we saw seymour hoffman was on screen and paid attention to how he pulled off the role of a villain in a mediocre hollywood movie. it can be said that his performance is what saves that movie from falling into complete mediocrity. he earned that credibility at a very young age, something we're now getting with people like cumberbatch, fassbender, jonah hill and joaquin phoenix, who was more of a contemporary and thanks to our beloved pta, now makes perfect sense to think of as a binary with PSH. not only was he convincing whenever he acted, you paid attention to the amount of humanity he was able to portray. it sounds dumb but what i mean is that to me it's still mind blowing that he could do that 'this is the scene in the movie' scene from magnolia and be the bad guy in PDL and the catholic priest in Doubt and Willy Loman on stage and Jacob Elinsky in the 25th Hour and Caden Cotard on Synecdoche and the Master.

Those of us who feel spiritually sculpted by what his roles meant on a personal level will now get the unpleasant flavor of knowing that the radiance he portrayed is now a lost instrument. For the unlucky rest, I suppose he will be thought of in the way I think of John Belushi, a childhood hero of mine who's only testament of greatness is how much presence he brought, even if he was gone when I saw his films.

Highlights like this give a glimpse at what he was able to do (looks like video is distorted on purpose). Face is the same, while the rest is hardly recognizable... Fucking chameleon! Not only he could shed the skin on demand (which is very rare trait in itself), but he was able to act a hell of a lot even out of crappy films.

More than anything when I heard this news I was overwhelmed by a feeling of loneliness. Here's a man with a wife, kids and this tremendously successful acting career who wanted to escape it all. He must have felt so alone and ashamed trying to battle his addiction all over again. That more than losing his art makes me saddest.

I feel a deep sense of wrong continuing on with life casually after this. This shocked my existence and so many others so much more. Thank you for this last burst of feeling and jolt of life's complexity Phil, I hope it scars.

As someone who has lost their father to similarly tragic circumstances (substance abuse/alcoholism---> Electroshock therapy in rehab---->suicide) I too feel immense grief and sadness for his family. The havoc that all of the unanswered questions and all that is left unresolved between PSH and those who were close to him can be a very difficult battle to win, or even make progress with. PSH was a real genuine man, which is not only rare in acting but also within human existence during the 21st century. This is one of the many reasons why he was such a successful actor, because he had more humanity inside of him than most people will ever be able to make sense of, and on top of that he was able to synthesize that humanity and use it in such a cathartic way that is rarely seen in theater or on the stage..

I know that i've shed many a tear over how deeply this man's performances have touched me.

Further evidence is not hard to find. Mr. Hoffman worked a lot over the past 15 years or so — in ambitious independent movies, Hollywood blockbusters and theater productions on and beyond Broadway — and nearly always did something memorable. (If you remember anything about the 2004 romantic comedy “Along Came Polly,” for instance, it is likely to be Mr. Hoffman’s terrible basketball skills and the equally dubious romantic advice he gives to Ben Stiller in that film.)

His dramatic roles in middle-sized movies (“Capote,” “25th Hour,” “Doubt,” “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” “The Savages” and “Synecdoche, New York,” to keep the list at a manageable half-dozen for now) were distinguished by how far he was willing to go into the souls of flawed, even detestable characters. As the heavy, the weird friend or the volatile co-worker in a big commercial movie he could offer not only comic relief but also the specific pleasure that comes from encountering an actor who takes his art seriously no matter the project. He may have specialized in unhappiness, but you were always glad to see him.

Mr. Hoffman’s gifts were widely celebrated while he was alive. But the shock of his death on Sunday revealed, too soon and too late, the astonishing scale of his greatness and the solidity of his achievement. We did not lose just a very good actor. We may have lost the best one we had. He was only 46, and his death, apparently from a drug overdose, foreshortened a career that was already monumental.

We will be denied his Lear, his Prospero, his James Tyrone in another “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” (He was the son Jamie in a 2003 production of that play.) But he had already, in the last few years, begun to shift from troubled adults to tragic patriarchs. His Willy Loman in the 2012 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” was a scalding, operatic depiction of vanity, self-delusion and raw emotional need, conveyed with force and delicacy sufficient both to deliver the play’s message and to overcome its sentimentality.

What he did in “The Master,” his fifth film with the writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, was even grander. It may take the world a while to catch up with that journey into dark, uncharted zones of the American character, but once it does it will discover, in Lancaster Dodd, an archetype of corrupted idealism, entrepreneurial zeal and authentic spiritual insight.

But also, as that character likes to say, with ostentatious modesty, of himself: just a man. Dodd is flesh and blood, appetite and imagination, a precisely rendered creature of his place and time. Mr. Hoffman’s diction, his barreling physicality, his displays of Rotarian jollity and earnest intellectualism establish Dodd as an exemplary (if eccentric) postwar American, an expression of the same curious cultural ferment that produced Willy Loman.

Of course “The Master” is after something more than reimagined history. Like Dodd himself, it wants to penetrate the perennial mysteries of the human personality, one specimen at a time. Dodd is a healer, a con artist and a self-proclaimed prophet. He is also, perhaps above all, an actor: a performer, an impromptu singer and stand-up comedian, a man with a Method. He calls it the Cause, but his technique of psychological exploration, based on the excavation of memory and the opening up of barricaded emotional territory, shows clear affinities with the process most stage and screen actors use to find their way into a character.

Mr. Hoffman’s way — not necessarily affiliated with any particular school or ideology, and above all the product of his own restless intelligence and relentless drive — took him further and deeper than most of his colleagues would be willing to venture.

Lancaster Dodd could have been a familiar type: a charming, slippery, charlatan. Mr. Hoffman made him more than that. One of his earliest scenes is an interview — part therapy, part interrogation — with Freddie Quell, a disturbed veteran played by Joaquin Phoenix. The unmistakable rumble of Mr. Hoffman’s voice conveys both sadism and compassion: Dodd’s simultaneous urges to help, to seduce and to dominate his new protégé. Later, when Dodd makes a toast at his daughter’s wedding banquet, we see both his arrogance and his insecurity, and catch a flicker of the loneliness that feeds his insatiable and destructive hunger for love.

Dodd at once invites our judgment — he does terrible things in the service of questionable ends — even as Mr. Hoffman compels our admiration. His goal seemed to be not just the psychological truth that has long been the baseline criterion of post-Method acting, but a moral uncertainty that remains too fraught and frightening for many of us, in art or in life, to engage.

This is not just a matter of seeking out gray areas or mapping ambiguities. Hoffman’s characters exist, more often than not, in a state of ethical and existential torment. They are stuck on the battleground where pride and conscience contend with base and ugly instincts.

Lancaster Dodd sacrifices his intelligence on the altar of his ego. Truman Capote risks his integrity and betrays his friends in pursuit of his literary ambitions, his motives a volatile mixture of compassion and morbid curiosity. The schoolteacher in “25th Hour” and the lonely predator in “Happiness” are both indelibly creepy. The frustrated academic of “The Savages” is merely (if also splendidly) misanthropic, and the grumpy theater artist of “Synecdoche, New York” may be merely (if also baroquely) frustrated. The priest of “Doubt” and the would-be criminal of “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” are potentially much worse.

These are not antiheroes in the cable television, charismatic bad-boy sense of the term. They are, in many cases (and there are more, going all the way back to “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and even the 1992 “Scent of a Woman”), thoroughly awful people: pathetic, repellent, undeserving of sympathy. Mr. Hoffman rescued them from contempt precisely by refusing any easy route to redemption.

He did not care if we liked any of these sad specimens. The point was to make us believe them and to recognize in them — in him — a truth about ourselves that we might otherwise have preferred to avoid. He had a rare ability to illuminate the varieties of human ugliness. No one ever did it so beautifully.

He mastered the difficult art of playing real people for better and worse. Always in solidarity with the people he was portraying, and you sensed always the person behind. With his heavy breathing, plump body and round face, he could be both sweet and funny, inscrutable and explosive, whining and self-pitying, clammy and creepy and rough and unapproachable. Phillip's passing is not good for anything. It's just heartbreaking sad.

It felt natural for me to log in to xixax for the first time in 5 years, when I heard this news. I owe him a lot for my film passion.